That's interesting. I would find that problematic for shooting certain situations, like high school sports. We use RAW for that because it allows us to pull up an image that was shot in some very dark places. I've shot in gyms where even with the ISO cranked to 12800 we were still underexposing at f2.8 and a shutter speed that would freeze the action. So having a RAW file allows us to at least get some kind of a workable image.
Adjusting exposure, white balance, highlights & shadows, along with cropping are all we do. But doing those on a RAW file, then compressing to JPG, gives the news organization a much better file to work with than if you did those adjustments on a JPG, then compressed again on the file you output.